Data

I enjoy using and perusing the CIA World Factbook on a regular basis; its intelligence has come in handy over the past few years. One feature i've always wanted is to graph any of the Factbook's data in any manner. Unfortunately, for comparative purposes, the Factbook only contains a limited number of lists and no easy way to access all of its data in a programmatic fashion. I've wanted to cross-compare different stats as well as generate and compare derived stats. Towards this goal, i've created a proof of concept graphing engine for the Factbook.


Internet users as a percent of population



HIV/AIDS - adult prevalence rate

These two examples of the graphs generated show the kind of comparisons that can be made. I wrote a couple scripts to download and parse the Factbook country pages, then insert the data into some MySQL tables. Then there's one more script that gets the data and generates google chart urls and displays those images and the data.



So far i've found the resulting data visualization fun and interesting. I'm also hoping that data mining the information will be equally fun and interesting.